Leaves In The Stream
by nocks
Summary: "There's a million things I regret." Azula and Ty Lee remember the past, far away from eachother and a long time after. When should you let go? Should you ever? Azula / Ty Lee, nothing graphic inside, rated to be safe anyways. 2/4.
1. Chapter 1

**Author's notes: **So. For one, this wasn't supposed to be this long, or to have a diary-feel to it, or to have other parts coming up (this fic is going to end up as 3-4 chapters, so not impossibly long), but it just happened, so I let it happen. For two, Ty Lee might seem out of character, but I figured that this is her a lot of time later - I mean, she was sixteen during the series, so, I'd imagine she'd be more mature when she hits 25 or something. I hope she seems more like an adult version of series!Ty Lee than a version I just made up so I could have this fic, but that's up to you. You tell me. I tried not to fudge with the canon too much - I went with "I'll bend it, but not break it", so keep that in mind. I hope you enjoy!

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><p><strong>Leaves In The Stream<strong>

_Moments_

Somehow, all our moments seemed to slip away before we could really, really grasp them, you know? She was too slow to open up, I was too fast, and we couldn't really catch eachother at the same time, you know? And when we did, that's when somebody or something or whatever interrupted us. Never a good time, right? I wish...

Everything would've been fine if she hadn't had to be a princess. I think that's what did it. If she'd been a normal, er, well, you know - a more normal person, she would've been fine. Just fine. Well, not fine, but... I don't know. This shouldn't be such a big deal, except - it is. Totally. I mean, from about, dunno, age seven or so, she was just the person who I played with, because I was a kid, and who pushed me a lot. And that was it - I was good at cartwheels, and she was good at making me cry and then sort-of-apologizing. I don't even know what it was that did it, but eventually we weren't just accomplices, like Mai and her, not just two "coworkers" with a good working relationship, we were... friends. She tried not to make me cry anymore. I tried teaching her acrobatics (she made me cry). Our auras meshed with harmony.

And, well, she also started trusting me. Like, a lot - for her, at least. She cried in front of me once, when her father punished her for something (I forget what) and I just kind of let her shove her head somewhere between my ribcage and spleen and tried to stroke her hair. We were thirteen, and at that time - honestly, I didn't even think about anything... well, anything to do with anything.

Something changed with the distance. I ran away, to the circus, because hey, it seemed like the thing to do, you know? And also my mother had picked up a habit of throwing things at me whenever she saw me, and my father and most of my sisters had taken to pretending I didn't exist - mostly for being friends with Azula and not getting them favours and stuff, and also being a bit of a bastard. A bastard child, I mean. I guess, anyways, based on the eyes (though no idea on how the rest of me still looks almost exactly like every single one of my sisters) - gray isn't exactly a very Fire Nation-ey color. Anyways. I ran away, and she... she let me.

I think that's possibly the only unselfish thing Azula ever did. When I first explained why I wanted to run off, she said that she would "end any pressure" from my mom and dad, and seemed really... you know, protective. Kind of a fuzzy feeling inside, that. And when I said I didn't want her to, she just, she just did what I wanted. She backed off. She promised to write(!) - all in all, she was very much un-Azula-ey. If that's a word. You know how anybody ever who got to like somebody toxic has this one moment, where the person acts all golden and amazing? This was it, for me. So, ages fourteen to sixteen, I was "madly in love". A crush, not that big a deal, just, you know, testing out the hardware. A little dry run with my emotions, latching on to somebody who was both far away and emotionally unavailable. I sent letters, often. She replied on time and seemed interested about everything, and told little about herself. We had this cute little code where she'd sign her letters with a drawing of a flame, and I'd sign my letters with a... hula hoop, because, well, thinking up something symbolic was far too much for my fourteen-year-old brain. It was cute and fun and nice for awhile, because, like said, she didn't seem like she was going to reprocate my, well, anything, so... I went on crushing, and she went on, I dunno, doing whatever.

Then, one letter - well, a series of letters, really, but the one letter was the most important one so I'll focus on that - changed pretty much everything. Like I said, there were a couple of them before it, mostly hinting at things that suggested other things that implied yet other things, which could be construed as being romantic things, and... well, looking back, it should've been obvious, really, I'll explain this in just a little while, but she sent me a letter. In it - a drawing of a flame... inside a hula hoop. And a question mark.

You see, well, I, who was at the time fifteen, didn't really get it. At the same time, I was really happy, but also really scared, and most of all I was really confused. Now, though? It seems obvious, really. Azula thought this was how love happened. Not with drawings, no, with _lovers_. Of course it did, royalty never marry out of love. That's what it was for her. A suitable spouse, drill out a couple of kids so there'd be heirs, slot up, close down, live a personal life only in letters. This was what romance was for her. Forbidden (yet in an awfully acceptable way) contact, warm letters from another life where she could live for maybe an hour a week, the rest of the time devoted to obsessively maintaining an image of perfection in the public eye. And I - I was her choice of... lover. Not really a descriptive word, considering no actual lov_ing_ happened (fifteen, remember?) but the closest alternative. Somebody who she could trust, somebody who she could direct her gentler feelings toward.

I didn't reply. Not the nicest thing I ever did. I never replied. I was scared, so I clammed up, and then weeks went by and it would've been embarrassing to write back, and then more weeks went by, and months, and... and I just tried to forget about her. Of course, I didn't, and I couldn't, not for long anyways. She came to get me. I tried to refuse, and... and then I saw how she was when she wasn't angry or cruel but actually _hurt_. She laughed, acted like she didn't care, pressured... this was her, being possessive. Eventually, I gave in. I left with her.

She didn't mention the letter. Not once. She tried to act like we hadn't been talking at all, she tried to just block it all out, like all her bad feelings would just go away if she didn't talk about any of it. If she could shut me out, she could shut out all of the hurt, everything. She swung around from possessive to rejecting. To Azula, this was completely logical: she wanted me to do what she wanted, to satisfy her pride, but once she had that she didn't want anything else from me. To want something from me would've been, to her, humiliating - giving in, letting me know that I mattered to her personally, and she just couldn't. At the time, I was fifteen and not-really-smart, so I just thought her aura was drab. Reddish-brown, all scrunched up and horrible.

I felt miserable about it, and after two days' travel, I couldn't take it anymore. So, when we made camp that night, I just poured it all out. It wasn't... well, it wasn't a very elegant apology, I didn't lead into it or anything, I just started and then went on and didn't stop. It's all a blur, and I can sum up what I remember with: I talked a lot, really fast, at some point I burst into tears and didn't stop for five minutes, I said "I'm so sorry" for about a million times. I poured my heart out: all the fear, nervousness, excitement, how horrible I'd felt, how important she was to me - everything. And in the end, she just... forgave me. It was a little awkward, but she did. I think I'm actually the only person she's ever really forgiven. So, anyways, then we sat out by this gorgeous lake, and she, well, opened up to me. It's hard to write any of it down, but... she told me, she told me she was so happy she wasn't alone. In those words, too. Azula said that. Can you imagine? Well, me neither. Anyways, well, then... then we kind of, well, we kind of kissed. First and only time ever. I'm sure a lot of you are imagining something really great and amazing, but, no, not really. It was, well, it was really just a peck on the lips, but... still. It was kind of great - how many of you had your first kiss by a moonlit lake, with a princess? That's what I thought. So, after that, we just kind of sat out in silence and then went to sleep, so, sort of anticlimactic, you know?

And, well, like I said, we never did anything after that. Everything was pretty quiet, since Mai joined up soon enough and well, I didn't exactly feel like telling Mai about all of it at the time, even though we were close (she was my other contact outside the circus, I wrote to her about as much as I wrote to Azula) and, well, we just figured we'd have time to figure everything out later. I didn't think... I didn't think everything would happen so fast.

But, like I said, all our moments always seemed to slip away from us.


	2. Chapter 2

**Leaves In The Stream**

_Regrets_

There's a million things I regret. It all seems like we fell apart so fast, I couldn't really even react until everything had already happened, and all that was left was to face the consequences.

Everything happened too fast. Too much, too fast. It all started with Zuko - not that I don't like him, but there you have it. His coming back, that's what did it all; Azula started scheming, Mai started fawning (which displeased Azula), and I started throwing up in the mornings - stress does that to me. Being in the middle of all the planning and plotting and gambits is really, really frustrating, especially when things really, really shouldn't be that complicated. But that's Azulon's family for you.

Azula started with her, well, being her literally the instant Zuko was back. She had plans and backup plans for backup plans, and... well, at the time I thought (and do still) that it was incredibly stupid. Why constantly be ready to betray somebody who's on the same side as you? Well, I guess it was natural for Azula - she couldn't feel safe without being able to backstab everybody around her at a moment's notice. Still, incredibly dumb, not to mention frustrating. Like being trapped in a pitch-black maze, not being able to see anything, and somebody kept moving the walls around - all I could do, at the time, was stumble about and try not to hit anything in the web of lies and intrigue they'd all weaved around me. I stayed out of the way and let everybody else do their thing.

That kind of became my role. I just went where Azula said, did what I was supposed to, and that was that. We didn't talk, we didn't really even acknowledge eachother. She had other things to do, and I had a burning need to stay away from the things she did - I didn't _belong_. I'm not a born politician, not a royal, not a firebender, I'm just me, Ty Lee from the Rabbit's Paw District, likes acrobatics and believes in aura-reading. And it drove me crazy, being plopped up in all of the stuff, so... so I started distancing myself from Azula. Physically, that is - we still talked, but... well, before you get the wrong idea, I started sending her letters again. Or, not really sending, just sliding them under her door, and after a little while, she started responding. She never slid her letters under my door, though - I always found them in some strange place, like tucked into a shoe, underneath my pillow, on the windowsill... the list goes on. This was Azula, being, for lack of a better word, playful.

I liked it. It was normalcy, and my life was turning absurdly abnormal. I mean, a lot of people lump me in with royalty and Avatars and important folk, but truth was, for most of my life I'd been really unremarkable. Wars, politics and important things had one thing in common: they happened without me in them. And now - now I had to be there, and it definitely didn't suit me, and on top of it all I was losing both of my best friends: Mai to Zuko and Azula to her own neuroses. My aura hadn't ever been less pink. And everything just kept getting worse.

Her replies to the letters became less and less frequent. She didn't hide them anymore, she just put them on my nightstand. She started purposefully shutting me out, closing me out of her life. She had her own things, and I had my own things, and these things rarely overlapped. I threw up a lot at that time - it's not glamorous, but like I said, that's what stress and misery does to me. I didn't choose it, though I might give some amount of money if I could just sob or overeat like all the other women, but I digress. The point is, our, well, relationship or whatever you want to call it was deteriorating, fast, and it was agony. I was just waiting for it all to end, for my oldest friendship and only romantic thing to just stop existing.

And then it did. It all ended with that holiday thing. She was already lashing out at me more than usual, but I just knew when she laughed at the, well, the abridged version of why I'd run off. That hurt. That really, really hurt. All this trust that we'd had - gone. I was mad at her for more time than I'd ever been mad at anyone (my previous record was about an hour, but still). I felt betrayed. I stopped talking to her, hoping she'd, I don't know, crawl back to me and apologize tearfully or something really dumb like that. I tried to tell myself that she'd make it all better, that we'd be back to the way we were. That she'd come back to me. Of course, she didn't. At that time, she was already somebody else - colder, more ruthless, more aggressive. It wasn't any great secret that her father wasn't very happy about a number of things. One of the last things she ever told me - and by that I mean like really told me, in her letters - was that he was pressuring her to start looking for a husband, since she was back to being heir number two (and that was probably why she was so eager to all of a sudden get a boy to like her). So she turned mean and cruel. She didn't apologize, she didn't acknowledge that I was ignoring her - I might as well have not existed, to her. I don't even know if she noticed.

A lot of people would say that she just treated me as disposable - that I was fun to keep around until the fun stopped and then to be discarded until later use. Maybe so. Still, I can't think like that. I've even tried, tried to hate her and despise her, but I just ended up thinking about how scared she must've been, with her father breathing down her neck, with all the stress and the anger - all the pressure boiling inside, making her lash out at everybody... including me. I think that she realised pretty much right away what she'd said, and just ignored it, because she was so overloaded and couldn't deal. A lot of people would say that I'm rationalizing her, justifying her, and that she was always a monster. Again, maybe so. I refuse to judge her, because, well, because Mai says that my biggest flaw is that I'm too compassionate, and she's right. And what's wrong with that? Everybody deserves a little compassion.

It's not like I'm blameless, either. There was that thing at Boiling Rock, and even then, she really didn't even punish me. I mean, yes, she threw us in jail, but, really? The warden was Mai's uncle and the guards were strictly forbidden to interact with us in any way, which, given the phrasing of the order, pretty much meant we were free, only, you know, trapped in the middle of a boiling horror-lake. Still, for her, that was shockingly nice. She could've done worse - like I said, I'm not blameless. There's a million things - things I should've done, said, not done, not said, done differently, at another time - a million things I regret.

And that's why I'm here, on a boat to a small island near the capital. That's why I'm writing this, because I need to get all my thoughts in order. Because she's getting out, out of the facility, and I'm going to be there. Because everybody needs, everybody _deserves_ a little compassion. A little love.

And because I can't bear to add to the list of things I regret.

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><p><strong>Author's<strong> **notes: **So, you'll notice that these chapters aren't all that long. That's because chapters 1+2 were originally just the one chapter, but that seemed awfully messy and way too long, so I split it into two. Other thing you might notice is that I didn't really pay attention to Azula's descent to insanity here - that's mostly because I think it's more interesting to write out that stuff from Azula's point of view, and writing it from both seems like an awful lot of repetition. Anyways, I hope you enjoy, and thanks for all the reviews and other things (there's apparently like favouriting and following nowadays, no idea what's the difference but thanks, anyways!) ps. I fudged around with the chapter after posting it, because I'd accidentally uploaded an earlier, saved version which was missing one paragraph. I hope nobody noticed.


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